The Deep Nick Cutter Quotes

Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned.

The water wasn't the same down here. Water is what runs out of the kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean- but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know. You're trapped within it, a plaything of it. Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure. The pressure. The soul can't cope with that. It shouldn't be expected to. Humans weren't built for this. There's a reason nothing lives down here. Or nothing should.

Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS Sanity is capsizing! We're going down!

Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.

The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.

An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?

Well, time works differently down here, boss. Sometimes I feel like I've lived a thousand lifetimes ... it's funny. The pain is constant. Sometimes it's so much that I can't stand it. I bite at myself, tear my skin off, but I can never quite die. Like I said, funny. But to hurt is to love, right?

Luke hissed, a release of pent-up anger and fear, and gave it a kick, which only sent a spike of pain shooting up to his knee.

unknown to him then.

His final surface sight was of a new moon hovering in its eastern orbit: a waxen ball whose light plated the slack darkness of the sea. Then they slipped under and were gone.

What are you so afraid of? said that same voice inside Luke’s head. Everything, another voice answered.

They were slick with the kind of adrenal perspiration that squeezes from the pores like the sweat off foreign cheese.

Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes.

Toy retreated down the tunnel with a scuttling crablike gait.

Maybe it was for the best. He could just go gibberingly, shit-smearingly insane.

it’s like leaving the Hope Diamond in a bus station locker: as long as nobody really understands its value, it’s perfectly safe where it is.” Felz

The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup.

He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.

This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, essential, Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.

It seemed sentient, watching like a snake coiled in placid contentment under warm desert rocks. Knowing, in the seething core of itself, that it need only to wait.

Luke’s fingers sunk into Zach’s eye sockets to the second knuckle. They punched into a pocket of curdled sludge that reminded him of the congealed porridge his mother used to eat. There came a hissing sound, but from where, Luke couldn’t tell. Stinking fluid the color of molten lead bubbled up from Zachary’s sockets.

The shrimp chips aren’t half bad. Kinda of like Cheetos except, y’know, fishy.

Blood stained her golden coat.

An adenoidal soldier drove them down

not far from the university campus. On quiet Saturdays in September he could hear the roar from Kinnick Stadium.

The helicopter roved toward the creek; maybe Zach had fallen in, borne along in the current that flowed west toward Coralville.

The water was a chilly blue—it reminded Luke of Barbicide, the disinfectant solution the old barbers in Iowa City used to soak their combs in. That stuff’ll kill you dead if you drink it, one of the barbers told Luke when he was a boy, as if suspecting Luke had harbored that very desire.

How’s it going, buddy?” Luke said, smiling. “How you doin’, Zach Attack?

People think it’s about winning and losing, sport, Luke told him, because he could tell his son was upset. About winning, mainly. But that’s not it. It’s about the trying. The not-giving-up. We’re all going to lose. So it’s about losing and going on, keep going on, even though you may lose again and again. You may never win, buddy, not at some things. So it’s about working as hard as you can, every day, to find your spot on the mountain. And then it’s about being okay with where you are so that you can get some enjoyment out of that, and out of the things in life that are more important than whatever place you end up on that silly old mountain, anyway.

Tuscaloosa Mud Hens or Richmond Flying Squirrels.

Organisms are tough. They do not want to expire.

A deep vein of terror threatened to cleave him in half. He felt that tickle inside his skull now, those little fingers trying to unmoor his sanity.

Hungry, hungry hole.

to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog

You’ve never seen the kind of dark we’re gonna encounter.

You fuck. You miserable fucking specimen of humanity.” Clayton’s expression suggested he took this as a compliment. It was perfectly acceptable to be a miserable representative of a species you cared nothing for.

It was so plainly obvious, wasn’t it? How had he missed it?

Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. And still, it takes a billion years to get here. That’s how big the universe is. It’s 99.99999999 percent darkness. And did you know that the stars we’re looking at right now could be dead already? Burned up, nothing but a black hole. We’re just seeing their ghosts. Ghosts that traveled a quintillion miles just to say Boo!

their lurid covers featuring men wrestling bears or coldcocking alligators, their cover lines reading: “Swastika Slave Girls in Guatemala’s No-Escape Brothel Camp!” and “Rabid Weasels Ripped My Flesh!

Hold on—this is gonna hurt like a fuckofabitch.

this was the apocalypse, it was to be an orderly and complacent one. The